Table 1

Clinical Population Medicine (CPM): What it Is and What it Is Not

Clinical Population Medicine is the conscientious, explicit, and judicious application of population health approaches to care for individual patients and design health care systems.
Clinical Population Medicine is:

  • a deliberate practice applied by practitioners and institutions

  • engaged health care institutions that reduce health inequity through improved access, health promotion, and disease prevention

  • using patient and population level data to deliver immediate and accessible indicators for clinical decisions and system design that are responsive to changing community health needs

  • grounded in the science of epidemiology and medicine, and the practices of public health and clinical care

Clinical Population Medicine is not:

  • a threat to patient-centered clinical care through rationing or under-mining patient or clinician autonomy

  • a substitute for comprehensive, multi-sector public health practice

  • limited to partnerships between public health institutions and health care institutions

  • a new medical specialty or discipline limited to specially trained practitioners

  • the same as health services research or quality improvement